With MTV-style editing - the rage of the 80's - lingering on and on to become a permanent feature of Hollywood's mainstream. People like Michael Bay who teethed on MTV's most splashy, visually melodramatic kind of pap and indeed was responsible for those dizzying Meat Loaf video's have been jettisoned to super stardom for their "method" which it is obviously felt - is the in thing.

Thus Armageddon arrives as a colossaly expensive production which amounts to no more than a glorified 3 hour trailer replete with tons of slow motion shots of the fluttering Stars and Stripes, striding heroes with a dramatic sunset as a backdrop, as the blurb reads: "For Love. For Honor. For Mankind," ad nauseum.

If you thought ID4 was difficult to stomach for its America-saves-the-world-yet-again attitude, wait till you see this one. This is about as jarring as film-making can get with endless set pieces of the same kind of thing. Red lights flashing, computer screens flashing danger or alert, people racing from side to side as the camera sways frenetically from cut to cut and side to side…."its gonna blow, its gonna blow!!!" One wishes the entire thing would blow after about fifteen minutes of this kind of frantic activity.

Bruce Willis plays a retard, which he seems to be best at doing and the rest of the side characters, all golden hearted goons who sacrifice all to save the world from "Armageddon."

Even the hugely touted special effects scenes last for about a minute on screen and for the rest of the time it's the usual explosions, fires, alarms, sirens and "its gonna blow" scenario's all normally set to a countdown of some sort or the other. Just to enhance the "tension" you see.

There are a number of hefty laughs along the way, all for unintentional reasons but the best is left for near the end when a choked and chuffed Ben Affleck whines "I love you" to Brucie, the man who saved the Earth.

Ben Affleck has a lot to answer for his atrocious performance not to mention Liv Tyler who gushes, pouts and bats her eyelids throughout this pukefest. And then to top it all, the emotion and trauma of saving the world from a meteor is set to a horrid Aerosmith number, which suitably and predictably spend months on top of the pop charts worldwide. Armageddon was also the highest money earner of the year of its release, so there goes!

Well worthy of its prominent position in the updated edition of The Worst Movies of All Time where an entire chapter is devoted to its rank awfulness.